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Dec 7, 2006

Christmas came a little early...

I received my copies of "LEGO Mindstorms NXT - The Mayan Adventure" today... the book is OUT! Amazon and Barnes&Noble are still showing the incorrect cover and have the wrong description (there are 5 bots, not 4), but I'm hoping to get this fixed.

For all of you who pre-ordered - thank you! My goal in writing the book was to provide incentive to create, some (hopefully) useful tips on formulating an idea and moving it to a real, working bot, and some simple fun challenges to try and overcome. Trying to convince a technical book publisher to consider a book for a "younger audience" wasn't that difficult once I explained that programming and building LEGO robots usually progresses to more advanced programming languages and hardware and the key is to generate an interest NOW in science and technology that will continue throughout school and afterwards...

12 comments:

On the shelves? I don't honestly know. I get my copies shipped at the same time they get shipped to the sellers. My guess is that they might take a day or 2 to get the books inventoried and on the shelves (I've seen books at Borders and B&N before sitting in boxes in the aisles waiting to be opened and put out).

Way to go, Jim! I pre-ordered and am looking forward to getting mine. I also ordered the NXT Hacker Guide but haven't received it yet. Amazon listed it to be released in late November, but so far it hasn't shipped. It looks like you're the first to get a book out on NXT in English! (I haven't ordered the Japanese book, but it does look good.)

Well, I can tell you that publication dates seem to be difficult to predict. My book had 4 different publication dates at certain points in the writing process... originally it wasn't even supposed to be released until Feb 2007!

The Japanese NXT book is good... I've written numerous times about it and am very impressed with the stuff inside.

As for being the first NXT book in English - I don't know. It definitely wasn't a race because I never really knew how long the process would take, but I'm glad it's finally out.

We have the basic nxt kit. Will my son need any extras to create the projects in the book?

You should really market this book to the homeschool community! This will be a wonderful unit study on robotics as well as archeology and the Mayan Empire. Seriously, homeschoolers are always looking for science and technology curriculum that can be used in the home.

I built all 5 robots in the book using just the basic NXT retail kit. The bots can also be built using the Education kit, but there may be some places where the Hassenpin needs to be replaced with another method of connection.

I tried my best to make certain all robots were limited to the correct number of pieces in the retail kit, but the best thing about LEGO pieces is if you lose a piece or are short something, there's ALWAYS a workaround :)

As for more NXT adventures... it always depends on sales. Apress was very supportive for this book and its unusual method of teaching. I'll certainly consider doing another one if the demand is there, but Apress will also need to be convinced.

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